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Ken McFarlane portrays Roger Patterson, the obsessive cryptozoologist whose career spent hunting the elusive Millennium Bug has finally come to a head. Ken shares his memories of the shoot:

My favorite memory is having my head smashed into a wall about 14 times. Fellow actor John Charles Meyer seemed to like doing it, except for the take when I fell at full force into him, causing him to speak at a higher pitch for a while.

In another scene, actress Ginger Pullman and I had to climb into a closet under the stairs which was maybe big enough for one small person. We also had to cram a crew member in there to achieve the shot. I was on my back with my legs over my head with Ginger and our PA folded around me until we heard “Cut.” It took two people to lift me out, because there wasn’t enough leverage or room to unfold legs and body parts on one’s own. Of course, we had to do ten takes. I didn’t want to tell (director) Ken that I was under a doctor’s care for back and neck problems.

The most disgusting part of the shoot was my costume. We dressed for cold weather and shot in Burbank California, with temperatures in the 90s and hotter. I sweat a lot on a cool day, so after three weeks of wearing an unwashed costume, it smelled pretty rank. Producer Jim even asked me about needing to take a shower; I think he thought it was my body and not the costume that smelled like the Millennium Bug. But in a weird way, the costume’s odor helped me as an actor with the believability of camping in the wilderness, brutalized by crazy people and eaten by a giant bug.

The most bizarre experience was having my head cast in plaster. Our makeup/SFX designer Robert and his assistant Bridget covered me in goop, with my mouth open in a frozen scream, at a makeup school where I could hear classes arrive and leave. As I sat in a corner for what felt like four hours, I could communicate only with hand movements to say yes or no. I think that was worse than laying in pools of blood and goo wearing a smelly costume. At one point during the casting, I fell asleep and Robert thought I was having a heart attack because of my breathing. It felt good to give him a scare for once…

Born in Nova Scotia, Ken spent his adolescence in Los Angeles, got his BA and MFA from CSU Northridge, and filled his adulthood with independent film and theatre. He recently played Polonius in Ty Mayberry’s innovative staging of Hamlet. Prior to that, Ken stepped into the shoes of a mortician trying to make sense of a dysfunctional Irish family in William Norrett’s comedy Brendan O’Lenihan Leaves Three Daughters. Other theatre credits (from New York, Vancouver, and Los Angeles) include Dracula, Six Degrees of Separation, True West, The Misanthrope, Enemy of the People, The Lark, Much Ado About Nothing, Two Gentlemen of Verona, JB, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Cockroach Nation, Molly Sweeney, and The Book of John, as well as the title roles in the world premiere productions of Godislav and The Crown of Minos. Film credits include Change For Food, The Golem, Noise Matters, Empire Builders, Annabelle, Rose Colored Glasses, Insomnia Manica, Delusive Dreams, The Short Cut, and the role of the bloodthirsty but lovable, martini-crazed “Jerry” in Caesar & Otto’s Summer Camp Massacre and its sequel, Caesar & Otto’s Deadly Christmas. Ken also made an appearance as a Roman general responsible for one of history’s greatest military defeats, on The History Channel’s Battles B.C.: Hannibal.

Sincere thanks to Ain’t It Cool News’ Ambush Bug (Mark Miller) for his kick-ass review of THE MILLENNIUM BUG:

“THE MILLENNIUM BUG plays out like a love song to all of the horror films we all grew up watching. There’s a dash of GODZILLA, a sprinkle of TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, and hell, even a bit of JURASSIC PARK mixed in.”

Of course, miniatures and monsters do not make a movie (though sometimesit’s tempting to wish they did). Actors are required to at least
provide someone to stomp on, eat, or rend with talons and teeth.
Kidding aside, without a cast of competent actors, there was no one to
tell the story. So we needed a casting agent and fortunately, I
lived with one! My girlfriend Susan Papa, who is also an actress, took
on the enormous challenge of finding actors to play the normal
American Haskin family, the abnormal in-bred Crawford clan, and the
manically obsessed cryptozoologist Roger Eagleton Patterson.

Susanfirst got help from casting associates Susan Baker, a friend of mine
whom I met many years ago when we were freshmen at Ohio University,
and Jason Bowers, an art student Susan Papa knew from her day job at
an art college in Santa Monica. She secured studio space in a Hollywood actingworkshop, placed the casting call in thelocal call sheets, and scheduled each actor to come in and read.At this point, neither Jim nor I was involved as the casting team didtheir jobs. Susan knew what I wanted in particular, which was anethnically diverse Haskin family. The Crawfords were likely going tobe anglo, and I wanted Rip – the most deformed and
monstrous of them all – to be BIG.

After a few weeks, Team Cast-the-Bug was ready for call-backs, and
Jim and I sat in chairs far from the stage while Susan, Susan,
and Jason brought each actor in. Each actor was good in his or her own way, but the one thing that I found so frustrating was a lack of competent,
ethnically diverse actors. I know I might get lambasted for this,
because Los Angeles is a VERY ethnically diverse city, but where in
the hell were all the Asian, African-American, Latino/a, Indian, Native
American, Inuit actors? We did get a few, but for the most part, it
was an all-white casting session. I wrote Haskin family characters specifically sothat we could have a step-mother who was racially/ethnically differentfrom her new family. If that meant that Byron and Clarissa were
African American, and new-wife Joany was white or Asian, so be it. But
that didn’t happen because we simply never got the actors into the
casting room. Granted, we were not offering much in the way of
compensation, but shouldn’t art trump commerce at the mini-budget
level? Perhaps I’m still idealistic… or just naive.

Anyway, there were some interesting/humorous/WTF moments during the second round. First and foremost, one actor came in to read for alpha male hillbilly Billa Crawford, and he just knocked my socks off. I told Susan Papa not to bother with any more Billas because this actor was my man. Susan was diplomatic enough to say “that’s fine, but just see everyone else before you make your final FINAL decision.” I shrugged, said okay, and patronized her. Toward the end of the day, the last Billa came in and it was John Charles Meyer.

If the earlier actor had knocked my socks off, John Charles blew away my legs. He was totally different from what I had envisioned…he was better. He nailed Billa right away, playing him like a Looney Tunes character, just full of energy and humor while still creepy and threatening. I had my second, even more perfect Billa, and I changed my mind. John was offered the part the next day.

One of the most bizarre moments came while an actress was reading for the role of teenage daughter Clarissa. Specifically, it was scene in which her mother screams for her to reach the plunger…

The dynamite plunger.

The actress clearly did not read the stage direction in the sides,
which indicated that the plunger would detonate the dynamite. So what
happened? The actress cried and screamed while miming the
plunging of a toilet! As I sat watching, I felt like Iwas in some bizarro world I didn’t understand. That is, until I putthe pieces together. It was all I could do to keep from busting out inuncontrolled laughter. From then on, we made clear to the actors inthe scene just what kind of plunger it was.

Another actress rose my ire, and as it turned out, shedid us a favor with her surprising demand. When all was said and done,we thought we had found our sexy-weird hillbilly Pearlene Crawford inthe form of a young (21 or 22 year-old) actress. The script hadPearlene the same age as Clarissa, (about 17 or 18), so that’s whatwe wanted to cast. It’s important to note that Pearlene had a brieftopless scene. Now, the debate about nudity in movies is not one Iwant to go into, but it was in the script, we notified all potentialactresses about it, and we offered a body double if they feltuncomfortable with it. We hid nothing.

But when we invited thisparticular actress to play the role of Pearlene, she readily acceptedit, under one condition: no topless scene. Fine, we agreed, we’ll geta body double. But this actress was adamant that the CHARACTER shouldnot have a topless scene! Her reasoning was that the audience would think (rightly so) that those were her breasts on the screen, which was thewhole point. She did not want anyone to think that she would do a topless scene, period. There was no way I was going to debate with her the idea that it wasn’t for her to dictate to us how to make ourmovie, so I respectfully thanked her for her time and dis-invited herfrom the role.

As I said, this turned out to be a fortuitous turn of events because
we had already seen a talented, beautiful actress in the form of
Ginger Pullman, whose audition was terrific. She was smoldering, sexy
and edgy, but she wasn’t the age the script called for. When casting
director Susan reminded me that Pearlene’s brother Billa was in his
late twenties/early thirties, and that Pearlene could be similar in
age, it made sense. Of course! We invited Ginger to play Pearlene, and
she accepted. Now that the film is finished, I cannot imagine anyone
else playing her.

One other thing regarding nudity and sex in the movies: American
audiences have no problem with graphic violence, but we sure are
uncomfortable with nudity and sex in movies. The Millennium Bug has no
gratuitous sex or nudity in it, and the topless scene is far from sexy
and titillating. When you see the movie, you’ll understand what I
mean.

The rest of the casting went extremely well. We discovered that Jon
Briddell and Jessica Simons (our Byron and Joany Haskin), both very attractive and extremely talented, had real chemistry.

Audiences had to like the Haskins, and hopefully, with the cute and innocent-looking Christine Haeberman as 18 year-old Clarissa Haskin, they would. Incidentally, Christine could easily go on to play teenagers while well into her 30’s. This genetic gift is something many here in Los Angeles would give their first born to have.

Rounding out the hillbilly Crawfords, Adam Brooks set the outrageous
and over-the-top tone as comic relief Fij, and Sandi Steinberg was
an easy choice as Granny Willow. Ken McFarlane – whose cryptozoologist
audition was twitchy and nervous while maintaining an educated
dignity – was also an easy choice to play Roger Patterson. Surprisingly, the character of hulking,monstrous Rip Crawford changed once we saw Benjamin Seton. Ben was smaller instature than I had imagined Rip to be, but he showed such sympathythat I changed the character to match him.

Ian Pfister, our Game Warden, was thelast actor cast, long after the majority of the film had been shot. Trek Loneman, an amazing actor I’ve tried to use in everything I’ve done since meeting him in film school, was the only actor I would accept for Uncle Hibby, the aged leader of the Crawfords. Fortunately, Trek accepted.

Of course, The Millennium Bug would not be monster movie without a
monster. But how do you go about casting an actor to play a monster?
First, you do not do a casting call in the traditional sense. Producer
Jim wrote up an ad that said something like “we needsomeone crazy enough to put on a hot foam and latex rubber monstersuit to smash miniatures in a steamy warehouse in North Hollywood.”Not surprisingly, we didn’t get many responses. Of those that we got, Benjamin Watts was clearly the one sent down from Olympus to helpus mere mortals. Before donning the arm extensions and showing us hismoves, Ben came across at once as an amiable, enthusiastic, andintrospective performer. When he mentioned Guillermo Del Toro’sfavorite suit actor, Doug Jones (who played AbeSapien in Hellboy and the Faun in Pan’s Labyrinth, among others), I knew we had ourman!

Ben proceeded to put on the bug suit’s arm extensions and give us
his take on how the creature would come out of the ground. When I saw
what he was doing, it all made sense to me. I’d been having a hard time
imagining the details of this particular scene, but when Ben mimed it,
it was epiphanic. Sure, I had designed the bug suit, built it, donesome tests with a student inside it. But for the first time, I wasseeing just how it would act. And that was all the brilliantperformance of Ben Watts. I would, of course, put him through hell forthe next four months. But in my defense, he asked for it!